Essentially everyone is familiar with receiving bills. Every month, like clockwork, millions of consumers and businesses receive bills for goods and services. For convenience, the term "consumer" is used throughout this document to represent both a typical person who consumes goods and services as well as a business that consumes goods and services.
At the end of each billing cycle, a biller generates a bill or statement for each consumer account having a positive or negative account balance, or having transactions that yielded a zero balance. As used herein, a "biller" is any party that originates billing statements for goods or services rendered to the consumer. Examples of billers are utilities, government, merchants, and intermediate billing services such as banks. The billing statement is typically customized according to the biller's preferences. For example, it is common for billing statements to be printed on colored paper, display the biller's logo, provide a billing summary, and show itemized transactions. This information is organized in a custom format that is unique to and controlled by the biller.
The biller also creates remittance information that associates the consumer account with the bill and any payment toward the bill. The remittance information is typically in the form of a detachable stub or coupon that the consumer detaches from the billing statement and returns along with the payment. This remittance stub is also customized according to the biller's preferences.
With the growing popularity and use of personal finance computer software, it would be beneficial for billers to distribute their billing statements electronically and to receive payments electronically. Unfortunately, most of the finance computer software focuses primarily on bill payment, with some emphasis on electronic bill management, but with little innovation in bill distribution and presentment. Many of these systems still rely on delivery of paper bills through the U.S. mail.
There is a prior art electronic bill payment system, however, that mentions the possibility of electronic bill distribution. This system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,206, entitled "Electronic Bill Pay System," which issued Nov. 7, 1995 and is assigned to Visa International. The Visa bill payment system permits bills to be sent to consumers via U.S. mail or email. Unfortunately, the system is limited in that the email message containing the bill must conform to requirements imposed by Visa. The requirements stem from the need to route remittance information back to the biller through the VisaNet.RTM. network. The biller has little or no control over the format concerning how the bill is presented to the consumer, but must instead accommodate a format compatible with the VisaNet.RTM. network. While it may be possible for the biller and biller bank to agree on some aspects of the billing format, the biller cannot independently control the format.
It would therefore be advantageous to devise an electronic bill distribution system that enables the biller to directly control the format for presenting the bill.
Separate from the bill format matter, there is another problem facing acceptance of electronic bill distribution systems. Billers may not be capable of, or may not wish to engage in, the task of electronically distributing billing statements. From a biller perspective, it would be much more advantageous to contract with a billing service to handle the electronic bill distribution tasks. However, contracting with a third party raises additional concerns. It is in the interest of the billing service to standardize the electronic distribution process to efficiently achieve economies of scale. Yet, the biller prefers that its bills be presented in customized formats, rather than standardized formats. In the Visa system, for example, the biller gives up control and customization to participate in the electronic system. Thus, for an electronic bill distribution system to be successfully adopted, it should accommodate the biller preferences of individuality while simultaneously facilitating the billing service's interests of standardization.
Another design consideration is that many billers already have established sophisticated, expensive accounting systems. It would be beneficial to devise a bill distribution and remittance management system that integrates smoothly with entrenched accounting systems so that companies are not required to change their traditional ways of practice.